Imposter

Faulkner: Stories (Knight’s Gambit, Collected Stories, Big Woods, Other Works).  Library of America.  1160 pp.  *****

For some time I’ve been claiming (rather proudly) that I recently completed a project of reading and rereading all of William Faulkner.  It was five Library of America volumes, and it took me months, reading the novels in order.  I was surprised, slightly, at my ultimate assessment of things.  Some books that I’d vaguely admired took a nosedive, most notably Light in August.  Others climbed the ladder, especially, weirdly, Sanctuary, which failed as a novel but had some wonderful set pieces in it.  I’d read it again.

The biggest surprise was that I thought Faulkner’s real brilliance was in his youth, especially The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, two utter masterpieces that are as fresh and startling today as when they were composed.  Both had been published by the time he was 33.  The truly great work from his later period was Go Down, Moses, which seemed his ultimate statement on race.  The Reivers, his final book, is a match for any comic work that he ever wrote.  Absalom, Absalom stands as a great, and greatly difficult, novel.  It’s hard to know what to make of it.  I’ve read it four times.  I have no wish to read it again.

Then the Library of America announced a sixth volume, his complete stories.  At first I shrugged that off.  I thought of Faulkner’s stories as secondary, often worked into his novels somewhere (especially the Snopes stories).  I also thought of them as slightly inferior Faulkner, somewhere between the novels, his truly serious work, and his screenplays, which he was writing for money (though he took them seriously and did a professional job).  Faulkner’s goal in story writing was to publish in the Saturday Evening Post, which I think of as a middlebrow magazine a notch above Reader’s Digest (I’m probably being unfair.  But the Saturday Evening Post was a mainstay in middle class households all over the country).  His novel of Civil War Stories, The Unvanquished, was serialized there, and seemed to me a sentimentalized portrait of that war, very well done, but a little like the Norman Rockwell cover that undoubtedly accompanied it.  Faulkner could make more money writing stories than writing novels, and the Post was the highest paying magazine of its day.

But I was wrong about the quality.  Most of the way through this volume of stories, I’m stunned at the sheer inventiveness and variety.  They’re all over the map (literally), and from all parts of his career.  Some seem commercial, but they’re good work nevertheless, and notably Faulkner.  It’s a whole aspect of his work that I’ve neglected.  It’s like discovering three or four novels I hadn’t read.

The man’s obsessions are here in full force.  There are a number of stories from Yoknapatawpha County, including two about the Compson family (featured in The Sound and the Fury) and a famous and rather terrifying story about Thomas Sutpen, the protagonist of Absalom.  One of the Compson stories is Faulkner’s most anthologized piece, “That Evening Sun.”  There are several Snopes stories, including the famous “Barn Burning,” which I’ve read any number of times, in which at least one Snopes tries to end the family karma (but I must say that, in this reading, a felt a fair amount of sympathy for Flem.  He brought stuff on himself, but people didn’t treat him well).

There are hunting camp stories, stories (again, rather terrifying) about aviation, a major Faulkner obsession which resulted eventually in the death of his younger brother Dean.  There’s a whole section of stories about Native Americans, and their eventual connection with Yoknapatawpha (when I read the Appendix to The Sound and the Fury that Faulkner wrote for the Viking Portable, I thought he had made all this stuff up on the spot.  But he had apparently written these stories before).  There are frankly patriotic and sometimes sentimental stories about both World Wars, which have Saturday Evening Post written all over them.  And there are more stories about the Civil War.

What surprised me was the occasional story about urban life in the North, especially New York City, where Faulkner had lived on occasion and which he often visited, like ”Pennsylvania Station,” about a couple of homeless guys making conversation and trying to get through the night, or “Honor,” about one of those aviation guys who had a thing for a friend’s wife.  I’ve never thought of Faulkner as a writer you could drop anywhere and he would find a story about it[1], but he was an observant man, all the time, and found stories everywhere.  It seems an odd thing to say, but he would have been a great writer even if he hadn’t written the novels.

(Someone, somewhere or other—it may have been Malcolm Cowley—said Faulkner’s greatest talent was for the medium-length story, something like “The Bear.”  In a way, The Sound and the Fury is just four medium-length stories, and when Faulkner spoke of his composition of the book he talked about trying to write the same story again and again.  He wrote rapidly and completed things in remarkably short spaces of time.  When he was on a roll he wrote furiously, resulting in some of his best and worst writing.  I think that’s what Hemingway meant when he said he would like just to manage Faulkner.  He was a little better at husbanding his strength, though both men were ultimately brought down by alcohol.)

I just finished the final section of the Collected Stories, and I haven’t tackled the section on Big Woods (which includes “The Bear”) or the Other Works, which includes “Spotted Horses.”  (I should mention, though, that the other night I read two stories that absolutely bowled me over, “There Was a Queen,” about the last survivor of the Sartoris clan, and “Mountain Victory,” about a Confederate major returning from the war.)  I also haven’t reread the first volume, Knight’s Gambit, a collection of mysteries that apparently came out before the Collected Stories.  I will probably read them again, though I sometimes find Gavin Stevens annoying (and I don’t think that book is among Faulkner’s best.  A new reader should move on to the Collected Stories).  But this is a magnificent volume.  I won’t be able to say I’ve read all of Faulkner, even the best of Faulkner, until I finish it.[2]

[1] I think of D.H. Lawrence that way.  Drop him in a new locale and he scopes it out in about fifteen minutes

[2] One more addition, as I’ve taken a few days to write this piece.  I’m rereading “The Bear,” and I think it may be the greatest single thing Faulkner ever wrote.